State passes out money for DWI, traffic enforcement

State officials are looking for ways to help local agencies battle drunk driving and other forms of dangerous driving and they brought their checkbook with them.

John Hacker

State officials are looking for ways to help local agencies battle drunk driving and other forms of dangerous driving and they brought their checkbook with them.

Carthage police requested and received $4,700 in grant money to cover overtime paid to officers to conduct saturation patrols to search out drunk drivers as well as traffic enforcement equipment, according to Carthage Police Capt. Randee Kaiser.

Webb City requested and received about $19,000 for overtime and equipment as well, according to Webb City Police Chief Carl Francis.

In one of the most ambitious projects announced at a news conference on Tuesday, the Joplin Police Department announced plans to use a $190,000 grant from MoDOT to create a two-man, dedicated, DWI enforcement team.

Other grants were also announced, including one to fund a coalition of law officers called the Southwest Missouri DWI Task Force.

These and other grants are aimed at one thing, according to Dan Salisbury, assistant district engineer at the Joplin MoDOT office — reducing “avoidable traffic crashes.”

“Last year we had over 7,900 alcohol related crashes that killed 225 people and injured 3,331 people,” Salisbury said. “We’re currently headed into our seasonal “You drink, you drive, you lose,” campaign and we need your help spreading the word that the holiday season should be a happy one, not one that is marred by avoidable traffic crashes. In 2007 a year ago in the holiday season from Thanksgiving through Christmas, 74 people lost their lives, 14 of them were due to impaired driving.”

Kaiser said the money would help Carthage police put more officers on the street with better equipment to catch drunk and careless drivers.

“What MoDOT’s here talking about today is strictly DWI enforcement, but they also help us out with a variety of other things and speed enforcement is one of them,” Kaiser said. “They also help us out if we have an area that has a high accident rate, if we spend any overtime monitoring that area, they’ll help us with that. We got the radar guns mainly for speed enforcement, but it also gives us a tool to establish if someone is driving over the speed limit and a tool establishing the reason for a traffic stop. Sometimes speeding is a tool we use to find drunk drivers.”

He said $1,700 of the grant money would be available for overtime reimbursement, while $3,000 went to buy the two radar guns.

“We average, depending on who the officer is that’s working, about $25 an hour in overtime,” Kaiser said. “You take $25 into $1,700 and that gives you the number of hours of overtime we can work.”

Kaiser said the Joplin officers came to help with Carthage’s first ever DWI checkpoint back in September. At that event, officers took five drunk drivers off the road.

“We liked the success we had and we thought it went very well, so we’ll have checkpoints again,” Kaiser said. “Joplin provided that DWI van and several of their officers to help run it, so that was a great help.”